7 comments:

Count on this being the latest item the media will ignore. When there's so much chum in the water, the shark doesn't need to hunt. It just eats it up 'til it's all fat and happy. That is today's Fourth Estate. That's what the "so what else is new?" is all about.

And let's be clear what the Watergate committee was investigating: abuse of power by President Richard M. Nixon.

What got him? His own audio tapes.

Kind of like having your own private server in your home and illegally operating it to have confidential communications with others.

Having a personal device is illegal for the Secretary of State to do. Should we be checking in with John Kerry to make sure he doesn't have one?

Why is it illegal? Because she's a public servant! She doesn't serve her daughter's wedding, the Clinton "Operation Shakedown" Foundation, or anything else... she serves US. Her communications are public property. It's part of the job. Don't like it? Go work att He Clinton Foundation, where you don't have to worry about anybody at the IRS bothering you and you can use foundation funds to pay your future campaign team. Fun!

But every time you try to point this out, her obfuscation team goes into high gear coming up with reasons, excuses, distractions, deflections and tall yarns to enable the truest truism for Hillary and Bill: the rules do not apply to them. The laws, rules and everything else are for the "little people," especially the ones who get in their way.

This chick is crazy. She's also exhausted, angry and entitled. And the Democrats are all in for her to have the most powerful office in the world, despite an extensive resume demonstrating that she's achieved nothing on her own and has lied every step of the way about who she is and what she stands for.

What would a Democrat president have to do to be impeached and convicted? You would never get today's Democrats to look out for character and standards in their leaders. They're too worried about being everything we can't afford to everybody. It's sickening.

But even the Snopes "Hillary whitewash" that you cite concedes that Hillary told a hugely material lie in a legal brief she wrote for the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon: namely, she falsely wrote that there was no precedent to allow Nixon to have legal counsel during his impeachment investigation, when she knew perfectly well that the Committee had allowed Justice Douglas to have counsel in his own impeachment investigation a mere 4 years prior.

Making a material misrepresentation of the law in a legal brief is not only dishonest, it is unethical under rules governing attorney conduct. Hence, Zeifman's claim that Hillary was "dishonest" and "unethical" should have been rated TRUE. The Snopes whitewash that you cited simply glosses over this fact.

Interesting assertion. And yes, Hillary is always riding on the edge of the law, and Zeifman is being held to that standard.

However, even though the right to counsel is in our judicial tradition, is having counsel an automatic privilege under the Constitution, given that impeachment is a political process rather than a legal process? If it were a judicial process, it would be tried by the judiciary and subject to all the Amendments since ratification. It clearly is not, nor should it be. Just like we shouldn't get rid of the Electoral College, despite the ignorant caterwauling.

I wonder about this privilege, access to, or representation by counsel. It would seem the impeachment process laid out in the Constitution's Articles I and II is very basic, as is the judicial branch under Article III. Yet the judicial branch has all kinds of rules and procedures based on its own operation and because of Constitutional cases that create precedents (like Miranda). So there's stuff on top of it, but the basic outline is the same. Those are the prerogatives of the political branch under the separation of powers (which we seem to have forgotten these days).

What you've offered here about Justice Douglas is notable because it was an impeachment, which again is a political process, and counsel was allowed. I don't know what counsel would do except counter the charges in a speech, correspondence or some other rhetorical device. I somehow remember David Kendall or Bob Bennett representing Clinton in the we'll of the Senate.

Gerald Ford summed it up best: "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." That's impeachment, and then it's tried in the Senate, with the Chief Justice presiding. The Senate makes its own rules, just as the House does, so I presume they could take the vote to convict whenever they wanted to, so long as they get two-thirds. Then enters the point about national tradition, and people not understanding this is a political process, not a judicial trial. That said, lawyers being lawyers, and most politicians being lawyers (sadly), they will try to create some judicial-like procedure to put on airs about propriety and fairness. My point is that they don't have to.

And I'm certainly not siding with Hillary, who was a two-bit unethical lawyer then and whose lack of ethics have merely scaled as she reaches for higher rungs on the ladder. My point is that impeachment is a political affair, not a judicial one.

I also believe Obama should've been impeached long ago for his Administration's scorched earth policy of using the bureaucracy for political intimidation. Isn't that what they accused Nixon of? If only Nixon had kept his recordings on a private server in his home, he could've completed his term. My, my... what a fool, eh? Then again, it's a political process, so if you have the votes to convict, do it. Remember: President Andrew Johnson was spared conviction by a single vote. Amazing.

My point is that impeachment is a political affair, not a judicial one.

You may be right that the political nature of impeachment makes it inappropriate to guarantee counsel to the subjects of impeachment investigations. Indeed, had Hillary conceded there was precedent for guaranteeing such counsel, while also making your argument that that position was misguided, then at least she would have remained honest and ethical.

But she blatantly lied. I.e., she flat out denied the existence of precedent that directly contradicted her argument that she knew existed. For that, not only should she have been fired, she should have been referred to the bar disciplinary committee.

Had that been done, we might be spared our current national dilemma of whether to elect the first president of the officially-approved gender who happens to be a liar and a crook.

But remember, the fact that she is a liar and a crook and that her husband is a liar and a serial philanderer, and that they've done joined forces to become a family of lying shakedown artists is what makes them so endearing to the reality television crowd, the low-information voter. The Clintons are exciting... one never knows what's coming next. They're legal tightrope walkers in their own circus. Everything is a death-defying stunt that the rest of us mere citizens would be locked away for. They're corrupt charlatans with a punch line, and the joke's on us.